Security Wise

Run FONPs, solo, in South China Sea

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Yesterday, there was a maritime security dialogue with US officials, including commander of the US 7th Fleet. The Americans no doubt urged India to join them in FONOPs (freedom of navigation patrols) through the South China Sea. Today a Chinese delegation was in town, as a paper reported, trying to convince New Delhi about China’s claims to all of the SC Sea, and not to join anyone in upsetting China’s order in that area.

China’s case does not have a legal leg to stand on. What it lacks in substance, China makes up with relentless bravado. Its fantastical claims in the South China Sea indicated on maps by the so-called “9-dash line”, which when Changkaishek’s Koumintang regime originally drew it, it was the 11-dash line in 1947. Based on “Chinese activities dat[ing] back to over 2,000 years”, Beijing says it owns every one of the rocky outcroppings, low-tide elevations and submerged features, many of which the Chinese have over the past decade diligently augmented into airstrips, small naval bases, and areas for radar emplacements by pouring sand and cement to create “islands” out of virtually nothing. That’s strategic imagination for you!! These physical creations are, by its reckoning, encompassed by the line dashes and constitute sovereign Chinese maritime territory. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea all these claims are nonsensical. Nonsensical because UNCLOS recognizes only the sea area within the 12 nautical mile-limit as sovereign territory. Nor has Beijing articulated the coordinates of these dashes and the sea territories they cover. Like the MacMahon Line — LAC — drawn with a flat, fat, blunt red pencil dividing China and India in the Northeast on colonial era maps, these inked lines in SC Sea are too indistinct to translate into actual geographical features, even less exact coordinates on the map. In any case, China has not attempted definition, relying rather on bilateral negotiations with the 7-8 other states in Southeast Asia who also claim the same islands and seas and who have always disputed China’s rights over them, in order to arm twist each of them separately to gain the most advantage. In fact the reasons for Beijing’s unwillingness to sit down and actually mark out the areas covered by the thick MacMahon Line, is the same reason why it is reluctant to articulate what the dashes mean on the map and what areas they cover.

A US State Department study reveals just why China is so keen on its expansive claims — it involves 2 million sq kms of maritime assets (oil, gas, seabed minerals) amounting to 22% of its land area. But more significant than its exaggerated claims on and below the water is China’s trying to dissuade in-area and extra-territorial powers from mounting FONOPs under “innocent passage” provisions of international law. Because should China’s control of these extended seas not be challenged by FONOPs even in peacetime, then the legitimacy of its actions in keeping all countries outside its elongated maritime security perimeter way outside the 9-dash line, would be firmed up by custom and usage and, in time, acquire legitimacy.

This is plainly not in India’s interests. But neither is it in India’s interest to join the US Navy in patrolling the waters in these narrow seas. Because that, as Zhongnanhai warned in February this year, “will do nothing but show its hostility against Beijing and devastate [India and China’s] mutual strategic mutual trust” and compel changes in Chinese policies towards India.

This makes one wonder about what trust Beijing is talking about? Has GOI ever accepted there’s such trust? If so then the Indian government should clarify. If China doesn’t want India to take sides on SC Sea, why has it sided with Pakistan all these years on Kashmir, terrorism, and generally about every thing, and going to the extent of nuclear missile arming the small, weak, unstable, Islamized neighbour to the immediate west? And why didn’t Indian governments 1970s onwards raise Cain, make international noises, and warn Beijing that to take the step of nuclearizing Pakistan would be to invite India to do the same vis a vis its neighbours — and there are more of them fearful of China than there are adjoining states apprehensive of India? Considering the Modi govt has not mustered the guts to even dispatch the Brahmos missiles to Vietnam that it promised, can it be expected to undertake more onerous actions to raise the costs for, and impose them on, China?

That China understands no other language except a hard one that it uses is the point I have been making again and again for the last 30-odd years. Unless there’s absolute, definite and immediate tit-for-tat action/policy after a warning, Beijing will go on merrily shoving India into an Asian corner. If India doesn’t like this, it should push back but this New Delhi — no matter what party or coalition is in power — has no stomach for.

But to return to the SC Sea, it doesn’t make sense for the Indian Navy to join the US Navy in FONOPs in SC Sea because it is not a good idea for would-be great power — India, to follow any one’s lead or be part of another great power’s retinue because then India’s status as a camp follower is reinforced. This will not do. But it makes a great deal of strategic sense to send Indian naval flotillas openly, deliberately, and repeatedly on criss-crossing patrols across this sea that Beijing would like to “close” — creating a ‘mere closum’ (closed sea), stopping at Brunei, dropping anchor in Subic Bay and Manila, having R&R at Cam Ranh Bay and Nha Trang, and repeating it all over again — with one warship designated to the area to this mission on rotation. Because China simply cannot be allowed to prop up its pretence of sovereign rights over this vast swath where India, jointly with Hanoi, has invested in oil rigs and has concessions for oil and gas exploration. In any case, India has also to wait and watch how the international community deals with China. If it concedes China’s claims in whatever manner, then there’s a good case for India to make similar claims, follow Beijing’s actions to the T, in the waterways off Komorta and Campbell Bay, closing off access to the Indian Ocean except to friendly westbound traffic. China, in that sense, sets a legal and practical precedent — whatever it is. Just as it has set a strategic precedent by missile arming Pakistan which absolutely permits India to return the favour and respond in kind by nuclear missile arming Vietnam for starters as I have been advocating for, what, 20-odd years now.

But when has New Delhi shown the gumption to thump its 56-inch chest in China’s face — not the same as belabouring a weak and decrepit Pakistan, is it? Just how bereft of ideas MEA is may be evidenced in recent op/eds of former senior diplomats. Ex-Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal, other than saying, on the Masood Azhar issue that India needs to impose costs on China, has no ideas whatsoever about how to do so. (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160517/jsp/opinion/story_85967.jsp#.Vzr4zfl96Ul). It will be safe to venture that pushed to explain what a reasonable counter to China would be, Sibal would probably support the Sino-Indian anti-terror pact on the anvil!!! Another diplomat, Hardeep Puri, member (still?) of the BJP foreign policy cell, (in a Hindustan Times op/ed, May 17, 2016) writes at an even more elevated and abstract level of focusing “on merits while mending the wall” as a way of earning “respect that is rightfully ours”. He says nothing about how to minimize the Chinese footprint in Sri Lanka and Nepal except to note that these two states have joined Pakistan in forging an “all weather friendship” with China. He offers no panacea other than use of the diplomatic “back channel” but whether this will right the skewed situation in the subcontinent, leave alone farther afield, is questionable.

If this is the passive-defensive best solutions to win “respect” that MEA types (and hence MEA) can come up with, than it won’t be long before India truly recedes to the millennial old jambudwipa — islanded in the Chinese seas lapping at all our borders.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Culture, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian Politics, Missiles, Pakistan, Pakistan military, SAARC, society, South Asia, South East Asia, Sri Lanka, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Vietnam, Weapons | 7 Comments

An Imploding China? How soon?

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Enough time has passed to dwell on bit of the back story of the recent Dharamshala Meet to discuss religious freedoms. The controversy generated by the withdrawal by India of the visa to the most famous Uyghur dissident outside Xinjiang or, as its majority Muslim population would have it, ‘East Turkestan’, Dolkun Isa, may have been by design. More interested in the publicity for his cause than attending a far-off conference Isa, according to insider sources at the conference, may have maneuvered GOI into cancelling his visa by granting an interview to the German media on the eve of his departure for Delhi, intended to draw Beijing’s attention. Isa was confident that a perturbed Beijing would insist India honour the Interpol notice, something the Modi regime wouldn’t have done, if Isa hadn’t gone public with the issue in the first place. Another Uyghur dissident Ilshaat Hassan, on a tourist visa, attended the Dharamsala do w/o ruffling official feathers on either side, even as he railed against the Chinese oppression of his people at the conference.

India could, of course, have preempted such a situation from developing had it followed through on its visa and welcomed the Uyghur nationalist with or without fanfare rather than peremptorily cancelling the visa and handing Beijing a major PR victory. But by now, however, we should be used to GOI preparing the mud for China to hurl at New Delhi’s face. And so rather than leaving it to Isa to not attend the Meet at Dharamsala, the Indian govt chose not to brave Beijing’s ire, and did what it did. It says something about India’s reputation, that has spread far and wide, for cravenness when confronting China that even the slight pressure of Zhongnanhai spokesman reminding New Delhi of the Interpol red corner notice was enough to buckle the Narendra Modi regime’s knees. The correct response should have been to advise President Xi and his government, in the most ringing terms, about the democratic compulsion of respecting political dissidence — something alien to the Communist system in China, and about (as stated in an earlier post) individual states being free to respect or not Interpol’s red corner notice where political dissidents are concerned. No major democratic country, incidentally, does otherwise. India has now proved to the world that it is the exception. What Beijing needed to be told in no uncertain language was that political dissidence is not terrorism, and dissidents are not terrorists, except in China.

The significance about the Conference at Dharamsala is that it is the seat of HH the Dalai Lama, who however else he may have failed the “Free Tibet’ cause, has used his moral weight to legitimate and sustain in the world the Tibetan opposition to Beijing’s policies of forced assimilation and cultural genocide. He is a one-man army that has kept China at bay for the last 65 years. So Xi will not have the courage to ask, as Stalin did the pope, “How many Divisions do you have?” because he knows only too well the power of this holy potentate to destabilize Tibet.

Beijing can’t wait to see the Dalai Lama pass from the scene and one can almost see a succession of Chinese leaders tear their hair out and rails in frustration as Jean Anouilh’s Henry II famously does against the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?!” Except, the Dalai Lama has been too restrained, not been meddlesome enough, in the affairs of Tibet. His nonviolent “Middle Path”, while beefing up his moral heft has left those among the Tibetan Exile community in India cold because of his refusal to sanction, leave alone encourage and instigate a violent uprising in the Tibetan strongholds in Lhasa, and in the eastern Kham region (of the Gansu and Yunnan provinces). The bulk of the youthful Tibetan exiles in India want India to train, arm, and launch them in guerilla operations behind PLA lines in Tibet and elsewhere. The irony is that, like Beijing, the young Tibetans too are waiting for this incarnation of the Dalai Lama to vacate the scene.

Tibetan and Uyghur militancy is still an outlier phenomenon for China. Not so the domestic political dissidence in that country. What the political dissidents in mainland China are desperately searching for is a Dalai Lama-like figure of irreproachable character and highest integrity, a moral heavyweight, in fact, to lead the Movement to unseat the totalitarian Communist regime in China, one who preaches and practices nonviolence as the means to compel the autocrats in Beijing to cede power to the Chinese people. One of the leaders of this Movement, who attended the Dharamsala Meet, is Yang Jianli, the US-based Chinese dissident who in 2010 accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the winner Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Chinese human rights activist, literary critic, teacher and principal author of the ‘Charta 08’ a manifesto for the gradual shift in the system of government from one party rule to a multi-party democracy along Western lines.

In a remarkably honest assessment of his own political stance and the evolution of his thinking, Liu has asserted that “My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture…. I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits, and at the same time exaggerating my own merits. I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity. Moreover I have used this delusional idealism to assign myself the role of savior…. I now realize that Western civilization, while it can be useful in reforming China in its present stage, cannot save humanity in an overall sense. If we stand back from Western civilization for a moment, we can see that it possesses all the flaws of humanity in general….If I, as a person who has lived under China’s autocratic system for more than thirty years, want to reflect on the fate of humanity or how to be an authentic person, I have no choice but to carry out two critiques simultaneously. I must: 1. Use Western civilization as a tool to critique China. 2. Use my own creativity to critique the West.”

Liu is increasingly believed by the dissident community in China and the sympathetic Chinese diaspora all over the world, aided and abetted by CIA, of course, to be the moral centre their Movement has long craved. As a first step, they are seeking his release from incarceration. His potential for trouble is why Beijing will never let him out. One Dalai Lama appears too much for China to handle. Contemplating several of them in addition — Dolkun Isa as an Uyghur clone of the great Lama, and to have Liu directly challenging Communist rule would be sufficient to induce conniptions in the politburo.

Per Yang, there is enormous turmoil, largely invisible because it is roiling the society below the placid surface of Communist China. But flash crowds collect in city centres and in Tiananmein Square in Beijing to protest, commemorate anniversaries of the 1989 unrest, to show their disillusionment with Communist rule. So, if Yang Jianli is to be believed the Chinese state is being hollowed out from the inside because of its eroding legitimacy among the people. This situation will only worsen, because an imprisoned Liu Xiaobo will be a greater problem for Beijing as he is a “prisoner of conscience”.

For all this to amount to anything meaningful, however, will take a lot of doing and time. But Chinese dissidents are convinced that the point when a new order replaces the old is nearer than it might seem to outsiders. That is a comforting thought, but not one India should base its policies on. Maozedong didn’t flinch when 10 million Chinese died in the great dislocation and famine of the mid-Sixties. Xi is unlikely to be troubled by Liu Xiaobo and his Gang of democracy lovers because the central power in China has always been ruthless in bludgeoning those who have stood in its way. Recall that brave soul who stood in front of the tank on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmein Square, daring the crew within it to run him over, and by sheer force of his will pricked the conscience of the crew, compelling that tank to go around him. That protester was never heard from again and remains unidentified to this day.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, civil-military relations, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, Indian Army, Internal Security, society, South Asia, Terrorism | 4 Comments

FGFA On — simplifies Parrikar’s aircraft choices

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The word is the Modi government has informed Moscow it will soon sign the detailed long pending co-development agreement for the Su-50 FGFA (Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft). This simplifies the choices somewhat for defence minister Manohar Parrikar as regards the three large aircraft programmes on the IAF menu — other than FGFA, Rafale, and Tejas Mk-2. The Agusta-Westland corruption scandal has pretty much sunk the Rafale deal for fear that France’s cultivation of interested parties over the past decade could end up tarring the ruling BJP regime in some way considering a lot of the IAF brass and MOD officials spanning the NDA and UPA govts may be implicated in any future investigation and who, in turn, may drag the relatively clean reputation of Modi & Co., through the mud. Because there’s always someone compromised and dirty…in the decision loop.

With some $25 billion taken up by the FGFA project, and the politically safe decision to fund and propagate the indigenous Tejas, the prospects of the LCA Mk-2 have suddenly brightened. Even the usual naysayers among the Air HQrs brass are in a funk, seeing former CAS ACM SP Tyagi facing definite jail time — a matter of when, not if, and another Ex-AF chief ACK NAK Browne chewing his fingernails in Oslo, awaiting sessions with the CBI interrogators who are presently collecting information on the Pilatus 7C trainer acquisition, and Tyagi, and also Browne, whose names are also mentioned along with one service chief in particular around the turn of the Century — all of whom proved great lovers of the French Mirage 2000 and ready initial pushers of the Rafale, possibly for a consideration — which is what CBI are trying to find out. So preoccupied, there will be little squeaking by IAF over Tejas and FGFA choices — of that one can now be certain.

The skew factor is how much value prime minister Modi accords his impromptu commitment to President Francois Hollande to buy the French aircraft in fly-away condition. Such commitments are not significant except to an ingenue on the international stage, such as Modi, intent on making his mark. He’s perhaps not aware that as a buyer Delhi holds all the cards. France can be told — too bad but India cannot afford the Rafale at any price and Good Bye! That’s all there’s to it. Paris, as I have repeatedly mentioned, cannot act uppity or hurt because if it acts up it can end up losing access to the still lucrative Indian market altogether.

The air force’s immediate need to make up fighter squadron strength will be addressed by a solution Parrikar very early preferred — buy more than double the number of HAL, Nasik-assembled Su-30 MKIs upgraded with retrofitment of the Phazotron Zhuk AE AESA radar for the same amount of monies invested in Rafale. The investment and advancement of the Tejas Mk-2 in mission-mode will win the govt applause, which has been rare in its 2 years in office. Together with the upgraded MiG-29, Mirage 2000, and Jaguar fleets, IAF is — honestly speaking, not in all that bad a state

So Parrikar, will make pro forma noises about the Rafale deal under negotiation, but let this deal wither away on the PNC vine, notwithstanding desperate attempts by Paris to bag a contract by lowering the cost to 7.25 billion euros (from 8.2 billion euros) for 36 aircraft or around 9 billion USD or approximately $250 million per Rafale WITHOUT weapons! With the full complement of French-sourced A2A and A2G weapons, such as the MICA (advanced Sidewinder equivalent), the cost per aircraft will skyrocket to in excess of $300 million, which sum will buy India 2.5 AESA-equipped Su-30MKIs, each with full weapon load. No matter how you cut the deal, Rafale isn’t worth the oodles of money it will cost the Indian taxpayer.

But why did the Modi govt do a turnaround on the FGFA that IAF wanted to junk? This because, as stated in earlier posts, Modi government was warned about the outcomes of “buying West”. It weighed the danger of Russia simply terminating all engagement with this country in the military sphere coupled with a proportional link-up with Pakistan, and deeper weapons co-development with China that would place India in a deep hole. It would have instantly seeded dangers on numerous fronts. Firstly, the hardware void cannot be easily filled by Western sources because the bulk military armaments are ex-Russian. Secondly, the termination of technical assistance in advanced and sensitive projects would quite literally put all prestige Indian projects into a freeze, which cannot be thawed out by Western countries as few of them will willingly sell other than “cutting edge minus-minus”-quality weapons and weapons platforms, and none of them is prepared to cooperate in actual technology transfer of the substantive kind, leave alone co-design and co-develop with India sophisticated armaments for love or money.

India thus has no choice– an unenviable position India is in because for 60 years a succession of popularly elected governments in Delhi have talked big about meeting all military needs through indigenous sources but in reality invariably given into temptations of numbered accounts and payments in kind (green card, “scholarships” and jobs for progeny in foreign multinational companies, etc.) offered by foreign supplier countries, and remorselessly throttled promising military high-tech, high value, R&D DRDO projects in the cradle. The result is a hollow military and armed services that can at any time be stopped cold by any of a multitude of foreign suppliers turning off the spares spigot, and grounding the country’s fighting capabilities in a trice.

It is ultimately the political class that is to blame for this situation, because it cannot summon the vision or the will to decree NO MORE ARMS IMPORTS and stick by it, come what may, and it does not incentivize the domestic private sector to step in to produce all armaments, however they do it, at home. Military brass and IAS bureaucrats are ultimately only order-takers. They will swill at the foreign bad money trough when they see the politicians doing it.

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ADM Arun Prakash reviews ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Published in ‘Seminar’, Issue 679, March 2016 at http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html. (Go to the left margin on the page and in the column ‘Seminar web edition, click successively on 2016 and March.)
————–
Bharat Karnad’s latest offering, tantalizingly titled, Why India is not a Great Power (Yet) makes for compelling reading, because even those who disagree with his passionate advocacy will admit that he propagates the
national cause far more effectively than do our effete policy-making elite. Sweeping in scope and provocative in content, the book is written in Karnad’s usual forceful and cogent style.

The author makes skillful use of history and Indian politics to bolster some powerful, and often bombastic, arguments. For a scholar living in the sheltered ‘groves of academe’, I would rate his knowledge of defence planning, strategy, doctrines, and weapon systems as ‘above average’. However, it is certainly not enough to warrant repeated excoriation of the
military leadership – past and present – that he frequently presumes to indulge in.

For an average Indian, engaged in struggles with issues of roti, kapda, makan, bijlee, pani, sadak, corruption and rising prices, one suspects that any talk of great power status would be akin to a slap in the face.
At the same time there are other Indians who would insist that further discussion on this topic is redundant because we are already a great power by virtue of our geography, demography, rising economy and, above all,
superior 4000 year old culture.

Karnad, clearly, takes a different view. On the very first page of the book, he lists out ten criteria for great powerhood that include attributes such as a ‘driving vision’, ‘outward thrusting nature’, ‘a sense of destiny’, ‘inclination to establish distant presence’ and ‘a
willingness to use coercion and force in national interest’, to list a few. Regrettably, in my 45-years in the Navy and Ministry of Defence (MoD), I have never detected the slightest sign of any such ambition in the Indian state or any of its functionaries – political, bureaucratic or
diplomatic.

So it would be fair to question the author’s quixotic inquiry into India’s ‘great power’ quest, when we know that a dysfunctional Parliament, lack of
vision in the government and the country’s decrepit, bureaucracy-driven security structures preclude any prospect of attaining it in the foreseeable future.

The book’s leitmotif is essentially a lament that India has missed every opportunity to rise to its potential. Karnad sets out manifold reasons for this: a diffident and risk averse polity which has consistently held back its punches, a stove-piped and over-bureaucratized government, absence of an articulated national vision, hollow hard power, over-emphasis on soft power and finally, a military which remains trapped in an industrial age mindset. He is right on every count, and renders a valuable service by dwelling, in great detail, on these national shortcomings.

What strains the reader’s credulity is Karnad’s radical prescription for putting India on track to achieve its ‘destined glory’. His grandiose plan is rooted in an ‘Indian Monroe Doctrine’ and involves India defining
a vast security perimeter, extending from the Caspian Sea to Antarctica and from East Africa to SE Asia. Having bound this area together with security, trade and economic ties, he wants India to act as a maritime ‘security provider’.

However, it is when dealing with China that Karnad takes one’s breath away. Choosing to ignore the very handicaps he had pointed out earlier, and the incongruity of a poor and struggling India donning a hegemon’s
mantle, Karnad recommends that Pakistan be downgraded as a security threat and eventually won over economically. At the same time, he recommends that
China be confronted head-on, in Tibet as well as at sea.

Some of the unorthodox measures he suggests to contain China are guaranteed to rattle the diplomatic and military communities alike. Apart from an unrealistic and ambitious scheme to establish Indian bases in
the Pacific and Indian Ocean as well as in Central Asia, he recommends that India should resume thermonuclear testing and arm Vietnam with nuclear weapons. Resurrecting a discarded Cold War concept, he suggests
the planting of nuclear demolition charges on Himalayan ingress routes to deter the Chinese. His most utopian suggestion involves the basing of an Indian ballistic missile submarine in Australia to deter China!

Countering historian Ramachandra Guha’s list of objective reasons why India will/should not become a superpower, Karnad points out that the straitened economic circumstances of Elizabethan England and
Bismarckian Germany did not prevent them from attaining power and dominion. History, however, seems to point the other way, because Queen Elizabeth’s reign was known as the ‘Golden Age’ of affluence for England
and a prosperous Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck, was the world’s first welfare state.

Having offered a critique, I must resile somewhat, and focus on the book’s true worth, which lies elsewhere. As highlighted below, along with a comprehensive analysis of why India has ‘flattered to deceive’, Karnad also offers rare and valuable insights into India’s post-independence security decision-making and evolving security postures. I would strongly commend this book to a broad spectrum of readership interested in contemporary Indian history, defence, security, strategy or international relations.

India is a nuclear weapon state with conventional forces that count amongst the largest in the world. For the year 2015-16, Parliament voted 40 billion USD for defence. To this figure, if we add expenditures incurred on the nuclear deterrent, on ‘special projects’ and on the Home Ministry’s million strong central armed police forces, India possibly spends about USD 100 billion on internal/external security.

As Karnad describes in detail, India has rarely been able to leverage its economic or military might to deter or dissuade any country – Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka or even tiny Maldives – from undertaking actions inimical to Indian interests. While the international community may applaud India’s apathy in the face of grave provocations such as the 26/11 Mumbai terror
episode, the taxpayer is entitled to ask whether annual expenditures of the order of USD 100 billion are not too heavy a price to pay for merely demonstrating ‘strategic restraint’. Most of the answers to this conundrum
can be found in Karnad’s book.

The author casts a sharp beam on India’s national security domain to unerringly pick out its shortcomings and flaws. He also, unflinchingly, points out the price that we are paying for this gross mismanagement, in
terms of a half-empty arsenal, a military-industrial complex that has failed to deliver and a higher defence organization that may not be able to cope with 21st century conflict.

One wishes that some of the educated few in India’s political establishment spare time from electoral politics to read this book. They would realize the truth of Karnad’s words, that ‘the lack of a comprehensive vision, strategy, game plan and primarily, political will,
and a scatter-shot approach to marshalling national resources… give the impression of a country clueless about what it wants and how to get it…’

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Bureaucrat facilitators of corruption

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The BJP government has picked up on the fact mentioned in a post from a week ago about all IAF acquisitions of late being scams. Those that have come to light are the Rs 3,700 crore Agusta-Westland VVIP helo deal and, not entirely unconnected with it, the contract for the Pilatus 7C basic trainer aircraft, and potentially a big scandal relating to the Rafale combat aircraft, with the same dramatis personnae featuring prominently in all three deals.

The one curious aspect that emerges from the media brouhaha about defence corruption is that while the political and military ends of these two deals — the Congress Party involved in both cases as the political driver, and the IAF dispensations under ACM SP Tyagi for the Agusta item and ACM NAK Browne for the Pilatus, are under the scanner, the facilitative bureaucratic element — the IAS officers in MOD have yet to be identified and their roles investigated.

The Pilatus scam arose from a simple fact: The exacting Staff Requirements (SRs) for a basic turboprop trainer were drafted by IAF for an indigenous aircraft to be designed and developed indigeneously by HAL. Once Vayu Bhavan succeeded in convincing the Govt of the day that HAL couldn’t hack it and the immediate need for a trainer necessitated the purchase of a foreign aircraft the IAF HQrs, mysteriously, lowered the SRs to accommodate the obsolete Pilatus 7C (just how ancient? Well, Burma used it in 1977 and Australia just discarded it after 30 years of use!), even though the higher standards for indigeneous plane were met by the 9C version of Pilatus and the other entrants in the trainer competition, in the main, the South Korean KT-1 and the American Beechcraft T-6C. Owing to the lowest tender (L1) system, Pilatus 7C Mk-II won the race but at a high price, with ceiling originally set for the more modern 9C or equivalent aircraft. The differential in price between the old inferior trainer IAF procured and the more advanced and current technology aircraft it passed up is the money available for filling the pockets of politicians, bureaucrats, and the senior air force officers in the loop.

The Italian court documents relating to Augusta helos reveal the proportion in which the loot is distributed, with roughly 30 million Euros in payoffs being disbursed in all — 16 million euros reserved for politicians, 8 million for MOD (mostly IAS) babus, and some 6 million euros for IAF officers. The ratio works to approximately 1:1.3:2.7, with the militarymen being the bottom-feeders and the political leaders the top-feeders. And these are the two sets of culprits who get fingered. But how come the bureaucrat-facilitators who take a big chunk of the payoffs and bribes in the middle go virtually unidentified and scott free, happy in their retirement to loll in their ill-gotten wealth stacked in prime real estate and properties, and dummy companies in the names of their spouses and near relatives?? This last is what needs a thorough investigation.

If one examines the bureaucratic big shots who were in play in both the Agusta and Pilatus deals, and nursemaiding the Rafale acquisition, there were many of the same people in MOD, whose roles need to be scrutinized. Times TV is the only television channel to highlight the one main MOD babu who was central to progressing these deals through the GOI maze — Shashikant Sharma, who was appointed to the Constitutional post of Comptroller & Accountant General (CAG). Asked about his involvement in these scams, he replied nonchalantly that the Agusta (and also Pilatus) needed to be investigated. So, the govt should do it on priority basis.

Consider Sharma’s postings — he pulled almost 10 years in MOD — rather rare for an IAS babu, apparently augmenting his reputation with every passing year among the political class for facilitating military purchase transactions. His record of postings (per Wikipedia) are as follows:

December 2003-February 2007, Joint secretary (Air), MOD
February–April 2007, Additional Secretary, MOD
April- August, 2007, Additional Secretary,Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances
August 2007 – November, 2009, Additional Secretary, DG (Acquisition), MOD
November, 2009-September 2010, Secretary, DG (Acquisition), MOD
September 2010- February 2011,Secretary, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology
February–July 2011,Secretary,Ministry of Finance
July 2011- May 2013, Defense Secretary, MOD

Now match up his posts with procurement decisions: As JS(Air), MOD, in 2003 he was the pivotal player for the Augusta VVIP helo decision; as Add Sec and DG Acquisition and Sec and DG Acquisition in 2010 onward he decided on Pilatus 7C and, as Defence Secretary, enabled the Rafale selection and deal to go through — a deal whose passage he initially smoothened as head of Acquisitions, MOD, and which is likely to soon explode into a full-fledged public scandal.

The Sonia Gandhi-run Congress party govt rewarded Sharma, perhaps, for services endered, by appointing him CAG, post-retirement, in 2013, to succeed Vinod Rai, ironically, an IAS officer with a spotless reputation and career record in MOD. CAG is a Constitutional position beyond the pale of the law. Hence, was this appointment then by design? Of course the indefatigable Prashant Bhushan immediately filed a PIL (public interest litigation) case in the supreme court challenging Sharma’s appointment as CAG for reasons of “conflict of interest” because his office may have to rule on the propriety of the financial dealings concerning the Agusta helo, Pilatus trainer, and Rafale transactions he had the main role in advancing.

As I have warned in my earlier posts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is best advised to swallow his pride and for the BJP govt to peremptorily junk the Rafale deal. Because if the 36 Rafale buy goes through, assuming just one term for Modi, the govt that succeeds his in 2019, will ensure his name and that of BJP’s will become synonymous with the Rafale corruption scandal as the Congress party is forever tainted by the Bofors scam, and where corruption is concerned will always be on tenterhooks about what, when, where, how and by whom the next revelation of BJP-Modi complicity will come — the state of the Congress party today.

If good sense prevails and political survival is on its mind the BJP government should now wash its hands of the Rafale aircraft, bury it, because for all intents and political purposes, it is already dead.

Conveniently for him, Sharma got his Sancho Panza from MOD days — his JS(Air) when he was DG Acquisitions and Defence Secretary and his IAS junior — GR Rao, appointed as Deputy CAG!!! And recall that as Defence Secretary his role was seminal in ruling out extension in service of the then army chief and now minister of state, MEA, General VK Singh.

So, how kosher does all this look? The Constitutional issue that arises is whether a CAG and his cohort implicated in a defence procurement scam are above the law? Or will the BJP govt have to await his retirement as CAG in 2017 before indicting him and throwing him in jail?

The problem for defence minister Manohar Parrikar, assuming he discards the Rafale altogether and doesn’t have to worry about being hauled up in the future for it, is how to explain his decision to buy the additional 38 7C trainers, when the facts of wrongdoing and payoffs in the deal were known to just about everybody in MOD and which have caused the BJP regime to investigate the Pilatus deal. If it is argued that Parrikar did not apply his mind then the lesson for him to learn is not to trust the advice of babus and militarymen with vested interests, discard what they say, but study issues and seek advice of outside experts, before making treasury-emptying decisions where military procurement is concerned that can make or mar his personal reputation and that of his govt. Were the BJP to also order a probe into the Rafale deal as it has so far unfolded, there will be revelations there that will take the country by surprise, primarily in how smoothly the embedded system of corruption kicks into action every time there is even a whiff of military acquisition in the air.

The point to make is that bureaucrats, as handmaidens of corruption, invariably get away with the vilest wrongdoing, assisting their political masters to milk the system while keeping a lot or little for themselves as nest egg, even as everybody else gets hauled up. This has to end. Consider just how crucial the IAS babus are in the procurement game. The military service’s role is limited primarily to the drawing of SRs and then technically and professionally justifying the hardware pre-selected by the political leaders, the rest of the shortlisting process being so much eyewash — this has been the Congress Party’s record anyway. The DG Acquisitions, MOD, is actually central to approving hardware purchases. And Price Negotiation Committee (PNC) headed by Add Sec, MOD, Joint Sec (concerned service) and Defence Finance officers, with a one-star rank military officer asked to fill space at the negotiating table and not actually participate, firming up the contract. And because IAS babus in MOD are generalists — whose knowledge of military matters even after serving many years in the Ministry ranges between iffy and nonexistent, the contracts that accrue almost w/o exception favour the foreign vendor (whose negotiators are all specialists in legal nuances and technical minutiae in their fields and who run circles around the noncomprehending dolts on the Indian side).

If the BJP govt is serious about accountability and bringing all the culprits in the Agusta, Pilatus, and potentially Rafale boondoggles to book, it better not overlook their main bureaucrat facilitator(s). Seek the counsel of the attorney general about whether a serving CAG can be prosecuted, at a minimum, for his apparent malfeasance and fiduciary irresponsiblity. If as CAG he cannot be touched by law, then it is incumbent on the govt to prepare an airtight legal case against him, and to prosecute him the day he demits office as CAG, which is only a year away. If the Gandhis and ACM Tyagi & “Fratelli Tyagi” and ACM Browne (now ambassador to Norway) are to be made examples of, so should the IAS officers involved in these three deals.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, corruption, Culture, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Weapons | 22 Comments

A perceptive American view on US Arms Sales to South Asian states

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

An insightful view of arms transfers to South Asia by a former American diplomat who served in the Delhi Embassy. Published in ‘American Diplomacy’, April 2016 and accessible at http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2016/0106/ca/dorschner_arms.html.
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Are South Asian Arms Sales in the U.S. National Interest?
The Foreign Policy Implications
by Jon P. Dorschner

In 1989 I wrote an article urging the United States to stop selling weapons in South Asia.1 It took a liberal stance, arguing that such a step would enable the U.S. to occupy the moral high ground. The U.S. should not sell expensive weapons systems to some of the poorest countries on earth. The U.S. sells weapons to both India and Pakistan, which they then use in senseless wars against each other. The U.S. reduces its credibility as an honest broker by selling weapons to both protagonists, and cannot honestly mediate the Indo/Pakistan conflict.

In his latest book Indian security analyst Bharat Karnad2 approaches this issue from a very different perspective. Karnad is a hardcore realist. He wants India to assume its rightful place among the world’s “great powers” and become a formidable military power. However, he sees Indian dependence on weapons systems imported from the United States and other developed nations as a drag on Indian potential. He calls for India to eschew imports and embark on a radical indigenization program to replace imported arms with those made by an expanded Indian arms industry that includes both the public and private sectors.

At first glance it appear there is considerable light between the liberal take and Karnad’s realist stance. In actuality, there is considerable overlap. Arms imports drain the Indian national exchequer. They consume valuable resources better spent on economic development and poverty alleviation. India’s number one problem is poverty. Unless and until India makes sufficient inroads into its excruciatingly high poverty rate, it will never become a world power.

Karnad correctly asserts that India could produce practically everything needed by its armed forces if it took the necessary steps to mobilize its potential. Such a development would have a profound positive impact on India’s economic development. Instead of spending valuable hard currency abroad, India would use its funds to put its own people to work. Indigenous weapons systems would be considerably cheaper than imported ones, freeing up funding for investment in Indian infrastructure and social programs. India could change from an arms importer to an arms exporter, further boosting the Indian economy.

As a realist, Karnad insists all foreign policy decisions must benefit India’s national interest. The same holds true for American foreign policy decisions. The overwhelming majority of American policy makers shares Karnad’s realist orientation and utilizes the same national interest test when making decisions for the United States.

There are plenty of liberal arguments for the United States to get out of the arms business in South Asia. By selling high-ticket weapons systems, the United States is an accomplice to South Asian policy makers who place weapons purchases above poverty reduction. Taking a moral stance against such policies increases American soft power by increasing American credibility. Imagine if the U.S. announced that instead of competing for billions of dollars in weapons contracts, it would market alternative energy systems to India, or work with the Indian public health sector to help improve the country’s medical infrastructure. American companies would reap enormous economic benefits from such projects. While the American arms industry is a powerful player in the American economy, it is only one sector. Must arms sales drive U.S. policy even when they do not benefit U.S. national interest?

But realist arguments can be used to advocate the same policy. Karnad and American realists share the same security concerns. They are worried about the balance of power in Asia. They see a rising China as a potential security threat, and believe China is seeking to become the Asian hegemon. Both Indian and American policy makers do not want to see this happen. They are determined to ensure India’s future security and prevent Chinese hegemony in Asia.

India must devise and implement a military policy aimed at ensuring its security from its principal threat. The principal threat is China, not Pakistan. While India and Pakistan have fought repeated military conflicts, no one seriously argues that Pakistan poses an existential threat to India. To the contrary, realists agree that it is in the national interest of both India and Pakistan to end their military confrontation and begin cooperation to ensure economic development of the region. South Asia’s inability to establish a credible free trade zone holds all South Asian countries back and prevents economic development. All the ingredients have long been in place for a rapprochement between India and Pakistan based not on mutual affection but mutual interests. Realists are the first to argue that sentimentality plays no role in foreign policy formulation. States cooperate not out of affection but national interest.

Eventually, Indian and Pakistani policymakers will agree on this fact and find the courage to take the necessary steps to make this happen. The terrorist threat in Pakistan may prove to be the necessary catalyst. There is a growing realization in the Pakistani military that it needs peace with India to free up military resources to tackle the existential threat posed by Islamic militancy. Pakistan has diverted military forces from the Indian border to counter-terrorist operations. This has not reduced Pakistani security.

While India hopes to “manage” its relationship with China through diplomatic engagement, the Chinese threat will always be present and will only grow as China increases its military and economic power and becomes more assertive. The China/India border is not properly demarcated and protracted India/China border talks have made no progress. China continues to claim large tracts of Indian territory. To meet this security challenge, India must extricate itself from the India/Pakistan dispute and recalibrate its military. Ending its reliance on arms imports will make India stronger and its military more credible. It will provide India with the infrastructure to defend itself in a protracted conflict without worrying about potential arms embargos by foreign arms suppliers.

American policy makers should realize that the indigenization of the Indian arms procurement process in in the national interest of both countries. A stronger and more credible Indian military provides India with more options. This is because it can defend itself without relying on foreign patrons. This client/patron relationship has long been a source of humiliation for India that has prevented genuine close relations. It removal would make it easier for the United States and India to cooperate on a more equal basis to help provide security in Asia.

This would have a big impact on nuclear weapons in South Asia. India’s growing superiority in conventional military capability compels Pakistan to rely more and more on nuclear weapons. If India took concrete steps to convince Pakistan it has no designs on Pakistani sovereignty, it would remove Pakistan’s sense of insecurity and allow the two countries could begin to stand back from the brink.

An India militarily self-sufficient in conventional military hardware is more capable of providing its own security and less reliant on nuclear weapons, making it easier for India and Pakistan to negotiate credible limits on their nuclear arsenals. Nuclear weapons programs are incredibly expensive and serious economic drains. As both countries build more nuclear weapons and integrate them into their defense plans, the danger of nuclear war (either intentional or accidental) increases exponentially. Pakistan cannot continue to keep spending valuable resources on a massive nuclear arsenal aimed only at intimidating India.

Notes
1. “A Farewell to U.S. Arms on the Indian Subcontinent,” The Secretary’s Open Forum Options, Summer, 1989
2. Why India is not a Great Power (Yet), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2015

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Military Acquisitions, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons | 5 Comments

How the system of bribery works in military — Agusta-Westland case

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

In the context of huge bribes/payoffs being basic to the Indian military procurement system, and which reputation has been burnished with every big arms deal since the Jaguar deal in the late Seventies — the trend-setter in this respect, the foreign vendor companies happily and eagerly make illegal payments to secure rich, perpetually paying, contracts. This system of bribery/payoffs for military buys is entrenched and flourishes and is based on three conditions: (1) The political top order’s treating procurement of military hardware as channel for making often huge amounts of money ostensibly for the ruling party but actually to enrich itself, (2) a crooked service chief inclined to make his tenure as profitable (in the filthy lucre sense) for himself as possible, and (3) the chief exercising his administrative right to post any senior officer anywhere, carefully selecting officers for certain key posts in the service hierarchy on the basis of his having come to know over the years as persons willing to bend a little or a lot and otherwise to facilitate the skimming off of the cream in arms deals.

The most important thing for a service chief with a mind to laying his hands on a helluva lot of ill-gotten funds from arms contracts in the pipeline is to post the right sort of pliable officers as Deputy Chief (Plans) and the Assistant Chief (Plans). As reward for being pliant these two officers can expect to benefit from the payoffs and/or get guaranteed sought after postings post-time as Assistant Chief (Plans) and Deputy Chief (Plans). With these two posts filled with your own men, the path is cleared for the service chief to rake in the monies.

Now consider what happened in the Agusta-Westland VVIP helicopter deal with the Italian firm Finmeccanica. Soon after the Congress Party returned to power in 2004, the grapevine was that the VVIP helo deal on the anvil was to be milked, that the word had come down from the political high that the new regime was sticking with the Agusta-Westland rotary aircraft selection, and the IAF better get a move on with the procurement process. The political was managed by, yes, “AP” in the Italian court documents, who the media has speculated is Ahmed Patel — the closest confidante of Sonia Gandhi, but the routing had to be through the distaff side of the First Congress family with varied business interests.

The Central Bureau of Investigation is on the right track by calling in the then Deputy Chief of Air Staff (Plans) Air Marshal JS Gujral (retd) for questioning. Assuming he’s prepared to sing, there’s no better placed person to explain just what happened and how in the Agusta deal with the then Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi in the saddle. Tyagi has been named, along with the strangely sissyish-named first cousins of his from Chandigarh — longtime middlemen in import deals — the entire caboodle comprising the “Fratelli Tyagi” of the Italian indictment. But why is ex-chief Tyagi fairly confident Gujral will reveal nothing? Because as the protocol among thieves goes, if you rat to the authorities, there’s goods against you too that will be leaked to the same investigators. Gujral is thus stuck even as Tyagi, who the BJP govt is intent on sending to the slammer, is twisting slowly in the wind. Unless SP Tyagi’s association with the Vivekananda International Foundation — NSA Ajit Doval’s baby, can save him, which isn’t likely because then the ruling party won’t be able to get to the Gandhis — Sonia, Rahul, Priyanka (and Vadra) via Ahmed Patel and his characteristic role reportedly as bagman for the family.

But how did the payoffs reach SP Tyagi? Tyagi is listed as a consultant to the software development firm IDS Chandigarh owned by Tyagi cousins. What Tyagi knows about software one cannot say for certain, except to note he’d barely to do much advising besides identifying a laptop computer. So the consultancy was the payoff route to the former air chief, with the Italian vendor possibly using the IDS Chandigarh as the channel, perhaps, handing over a CD with some software development information which could be passed off as part of the offsets obligation worth $10-odd million.

CBI may already be on to this SP Tyagi payoff mode.

The larger issue remains unaddressed though. And it is not just the Western vendor companies that are in the business of buying into arms deals in the above fashion. The Russians have been just as active, where IAF is concerned, starting with the Su-30MKI contract. If the BJP is serious about making the defence procurement system “corruption mukt”, about rooting out corruption, it can task CBI to do time bound investigations beginning with the Su-30 deal in the 1990s and every procurement contract since then, including for the MiG- 21 bis upgrade, British Hawk, the Mirage 2000, the Mirage 2000 upgrade, and now the Rafale. Were the CBI to dig a bit it’ll find a whole slate of Chiefs of Air Staff, Deputy Chiefs of Air Staff, and Assistant Chiefs of Air Staff to hunt down. To just hang Tyagi or some other service chief would be to leave the corruption system in place intact.

MOD has to also alter the system to take the administrative power of posting away from service chiefs and to seriously vet officers shortlisted for the posts of deputy chief (plans) and assistant chief (plans) of all the services before they are appointed. That will be the first and significant step to end the rot in the military.

Prime minister Narendra Modi and defence minister Manohar Parrikar have so far proved they are clean and above board. They can make this basic systemic change in the military service chiefs’ authority to make it impossibly difficult for the political top order in the future to initiate corrupt deals and see them through to fruition. This small change will be like taking an ax to a major source of corruption in government — the biggest, most lethal, internal security threat to the Indian republic, and far more dangerous than terrorism, Naxalism, or even extremist Islam. Corruption has already eaten away at the entrails of the government, the armed services, and the nation.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, corruption, Culture, Defence Industry, domestic politics, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions, Russia, society, South Asia | 13 Comments

Losing face and its awful consequences

Posted on May 1, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Nothing is more degrading in the Chinese mindview and cultural outlook than to lose face to a foreigner or in, international affairs, to a foreign country. By the same token to induce loss of face in an adversary is the ultimate triumph as token of acknowledgement by the rival of one’s superior status. Beijing managed to do just this, compel New Delhi to back down on the issue of visas to political dissidents which, as stated in an earlier post, does not fall within the purview of Interpol’s red corner notice. The BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has still not realized the magnitude of disaster it has brought on with its rank kowtow to China.

The question is how did this happen? The scapegoating of Home Ministry by MEA for this entirely avoidable self-inflicted diplomatic and political self-goal and injury is laughable were the consequences not so far reaching. So,let’s deconstruct this GOI decision because, make no mistake, this was largely a PMO decision.

Is it even conceivable that the matter of visas to the Uyghur dissident Dolkun Isa and the two human rights campaigners from HongKong was thought up independently by MEA? No. So this was an exclusively PMO initiative and apparently NSA Ajit Doval’s brainwave. If the MEA is implicated it is to the extent of Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar okaying such a move by PMO. It is reasonable to assume that the Indian Ambassador in Beijing, Vijay Gokhale, who unlike Jaishankar is a China specialist and Mandarin speaker and, who senior intel officers claim would have approved of such a move in case he was consulted by the FS.

So the responsibility is squarely Doval’s who has no expertise re: China, but who was quick to assume the responsibility that other NSAs, such as Shivshankar Menon, have for, say, negotiating a border resolution despite his being a neophyte in the field, and has now created this quite enormous mess. Wasn’t he aware of Chinese sensitivities and, if he was, and still proceeded, seeing the Isa visa as a symbolic retaliation against China’s unending provocations, was he then prepared to weather the inevitable storm? Let’s presume he was. So far so fine. So how and why did GOI do an about turn and hugely compound the problem by withdrawing the visas to Isa, et al under Chinese pressure?

Did Doval get PM’s assent for the Isa invite? Likely. But Modi cannot be expected to weigh any decision without being informed of the pros and cons, in which case Doval’s articulation of the +ives and -ves was crucial. Whether he did or not, once the decision was made, Modi has to own it. That is our scheme of things, every decision, especially those that blow up in New Delhi’s face, is ultimately PM’s responsibility. However, having made the decision — however it got made — to resile from it, and cravenly to buckle under the weight of Beijing’s indignation was far, far worse. Who is responsible for that?

Considering the flow of events so far — assuming this is what actually transpired — once China reacted badly to the Isa visa issue and it became an international cause celebre, it was, in all probability, Modi alone who decided to cut his losses and protect his hot line to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose promises of investment in infrastructure, etc he is relying on. This way out was the prudent thing to do, Modi perhaps thought, than to bask in the the momentary glow of cocking a snook at Beijing. Except being obviously ignorant of the importance of “face” and particularly of “saving” it in the Chinese universe, his hurried decision to make amends and keep Isa and other “troublemakers” out has amounted in effect to handing China an enormous political victory, and India a substantive reduction in its value. Next time Modi meets Xi just watch how much more puffed up and pro-consular the latter will be in his attitude for slapping down the former — leader of the “Western kingdom” as India is depicted in Chinese legends and lore. The hurt to India’s reputation will, like radioactive fallout, spread outwards through Asia.

May be the Indian government and politicians are so used to compromising national honour, this is another small incident — who cares. But this loss of face will matter. Beijing now knows that India can be badgered, bullied, and threatened into falling in line and compelled to follow its line. This is only the latest in the series of foreign policy downs and downs characterized by New Delhi’s bowing to China’s warnings one day, doing things to please the US the next. Messrs Modi & Doval seem to alight on ever newer and more novel ways for India to debase itself. Where will it end?

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US. | 39 Comments

India’s Foreign Policy: The Foreign Hand — Has India outsourced foreign policy to American think tanks?

Posted on April 29, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The following is published as ‘Open Essay’ in ‘Open’ magazine, dated April 29, 2016 at http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/indias-foreign-policy-the-foreign-hand#all
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IN 2013, Brookings Institution, a prestigious American think tank, opened its New Delhi chapter, promising to disseminate ‘recommendations for Indian policymakers’. Three years later, its Washington twin, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, set up shop in the country, hoping to develop ‘fresh policy ideas and direct[ly] [engage] and collaborat[e] with decision makers in [Indian] government, business, and civil society’. It is reasonable to surmise that the policy advice proffered by these two organisations will, at a minimum, be in tune with the US interests and geopolitics.

In fact, at an event on 6 April, Sunil Mittal, owner of Bharti Airtel, a big donor and chairman of the board of trustees of Carnegie India, removed any doubts on this score. “We have put out our flag here,” he declared, without a trace of irony in a speech that to some seemed studded with many other cringe-worthy gems, such as his plea to numerous Indian moneybags in the audience to show more “generosity in moving our agenda forward”—meaning, presumably, the Carnegie (cum-Brookings)-qua-US government policy agenda in this country.

Carnegie and Brookings have established a presence financed by Indians, to influence the Indian Government and engender domestic policies that resonate with the United States’ regional and international posture. It is a business model last implemented when the famed Jagat Seths of Murshidabad subsidised the East India Company’s operations.

It marks an astonishing turn in Indian foreign policy that until the last years of the 20th century had made good by leveraging the country’s autonomous heft and independent standing in the world—keeping all big powers at bay while getting close to this or that major country on a contingency basis to advance specific strategic interests from time to time, and by scrupulously preserving its broad policy latitude and freedom of action. But Shivshankar Menon, a star in the Brookings India firmament, during his time as India’s Foreign Secretary and National Security Adviser in the Manmohan Singh dispensation, scoffed at Indian policies to ‘balance’ regional and international power as “oh so 19th century” and now foresees no detrimental outcomes from buying into US security schemes. That such sentiments are mainstream today is attributable to the institutionalisation in the late 1990s of the collaborationist school of national security policy thinking propagated by the late K Subrahmanyam, the ‘go to’ strategist for the Indian Government.

In a nutshell, Subrahmanyam’s idea was that in a world dominated by the US, it made economic, technological and military sense to foster a strategic partnership with it to help propel the Indian economy forward and enable the country to technologically and militarily compete with China, and, by acting as a ‘responsible’ country with ‘reasonable’ policies, become a stakeholder in a system of durable peace in Asia overseen by Washington DC. The policies of AB Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi have hewed to the Subrahmanyam script. They have made capital purchases ($10 billion worth of transport planes, for example, with $25 billion worth of nuclear reactors in the pipeline), courted US trade and investments, enhanced military cooperation, and even compromised India’s nuclear security (by acquiescing in a testing moratorium cemented by the Indo-US nuclear deal and restricting India to a small nuclear arsenal for ‘minimum deterrence’). It may be recalled that Subrahmanyam and his acolytes campaigned for India’s signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1995-96, which would have left India stranded short of even basic low-yield fission weapons.

Subrahmanyam’s prescriptions found eager takers because toadying up to the West is in India’s genes. The retention, post- 1947, of the colonial-era civil services, administrative structure and armed forces wedded to British norms and values has perpetuated policies in the Western mould, notwithstanding the ‘socialism’ professed by its rulers. Moreover, the English-medium education system has had its effect. This is another colonial legacy that today mass produces software specialists, engineers, doctors and financial managers itching to service the post- industrial economies of the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Indian policies to keep this ‘brain bank’ solvent have helped firm up domestic support for US-friendly policies among the middle-class and other aspiring sections of the Indian society, complete with an annual song-and-dance celebration of our ‘pravasis’ staged by the Ministry of External Affairs which loops back into jam-packed NRI receptions for Prime Minister Modi on his jaunts to Western cities.

The outsourcing of India’s foreign policy begs the question: Does the Indian Government have a sense of India? India, in the minds of the new lot of Indian rulers, is thus increasingly only a cultural expression, not a national territorial entity whose interests have to be vigorously protected, pursued and advanced by any and all means. In their reckoning, the nation and national interest are fungible concepts and the policies meant to serve them can be entirely elastic. So, C Raja Mohan, director of the local Carnegie unit, argues for India’s becoming a part of the ‘political West’ and for its joining China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative, deeming these moves as “pragmatic economics and muscular geopolitics”. But cutting deals at every step reflects a susceptibility to pressure and an infirm will, compounding the confusion at the heart of Indian foreign and military policies. When aggregated, the effects of such moves can quickly hollow out the nation.

Central to giving legitimacy to the role of American think tanks in shaping Indian foreign policy is Ashley Tellis. As a senior Carnegie associate in Washington and heavyweight policy wonk, he finessed the Nuclear Deal with the US through Indian corridors. Tellis enjoys unprecedented access to the highest in the land, and rarely misses an opportunity to push US objectives in the guise of serving India’s interests. He, for instance, contends in a recent monograph that India’s best bet is to ally with the US and Japan because it will ‘never be capable of holding its own against… China or defining the international system to its advantage in the face of possible opposition’, and, that even Modi’s more modest goal of making India ‘a leading power’ will require it to lean on the US.

This is a self-serving thesis for the obvious reason that India has not discriminately built up its strategic capabilities or exercised its hard power options to make life difficult for China, nor reacted in kind to China’s elbows in the face. Beijing has had a free pass. Merely mentioning a transfer of nuclear missiles to Vietnam and the Philippines, or activation of the Tibet and Uyghur ‘cards’, is to hint at the sort of trouble India can create for China as payback for its nuclear missile arming of Pakistan and supporting insurgencies in the Indian northeast.

Consumed with pleasing Washington and fearful of displeasing Beijing, Indian governments—including Modi’s— have settled into a comfortable niche they have carved out of a small-minded, narrow-visioned Indian state that can be relied upon not to be disruptive, create trouble, or undermine regional and global orders that victimise it. Such weak-willed and weak-kneed regimes will, however, seek ‘narratives’ from Carnegie and Brookings that would justify their risk-averse, talk-much-do-little policies that hitch the country to the US bandwagon. This last, Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said at the Carnegie do, constitutes “a contemporary agenda [that goes] beyond the debates of a less confident era”. India, he averred, must “leverage the dominant, collaborate with the convergent, and manage the competition”.

Subrahmanyam had observed that, “With the Americans, you purchase not just weapons but a security relationship… [We should] build it into [our] calculations.” Jaishankar didn’t explain how Modi’s forging a military alliance with the US by signing the ‘foundational agreements’ that Washington desires, such as the Logistics Support Agreement (LSA), Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement, and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement, which will tar India’s reputation in the Third World, limit India’s room for manoeuvre, alienate Moscow, hobble sensitive strategic projects involving Russian technical expertise, and comprehensively ground the country’s fighting capabilities featuring Russian hardware, even as America offers us armaments of 1970s vintage—F-16/F-18 combat aircraft, will ‘leverage the dominant’ and serve the national interest.

The LSA, for example, is unnecessary because it only formalises an existing arrangement whereby US ships and aircraft are refuelled and replenished on a barter basis to avoid negotiating the complex accounting systems in each other’s country and handling cash. The LSA will end up re-hyphenating India with Pakistan, as Islamabad is on the LSA grid and to get reimbursement for sustaining and servicing US troops in Afghanistan, has to jump through procedural hoops and face US Congressional scrutiny. Does Modi favour exposing the Indian military to this kind of public humiliation in another country? Apologists for the accords claim they will extend the operational reach of the Indian navy and air force. But why would New Delhi opt for such a short-term salve when the long term solution of developing distant bases (in the Agalégas in Mauritius, in northern Mozambique, Seychelles, et al) is available for the asking?

Modi’s approval of these agreements— to satisfy President Barack Obama, perhaps—may be traced to his palpable fascination with the US. He is planning his fourth visit to Washington soon. It is in keeping with the impetuous decisions he makes (such as committing the country to buy 36 Rafale fighter aircraft in Paris, initially disavowing India’s claim on the Kohinoor diamond, among others) as friendly gestures to his Western hosts.

Outsourcing of India’s foreign policy in small and big ways begs the larger question: Does the Indian Government have a sense of India, its role in the region and the world, of the nation’s inherent capacity to shape its own future, and to mobilise resources for it? The answer is iffy. Why else would one see India running in place for the last six decades and still expect it to get somewhere? When a country doesn’t know what it wants and how to get it, it will latch on to imported solutions. A facilitative factor is the Indian Government’s naiveté and gullibility when dealing with Western countries, resulting in its swallowing nonsensical promises such as Washington’s to help India become ‘a major power’. Related to it is the civilisational failing of mistaking tactics for strategy. It is the same old story all over again. Incapable of seeing beyond their immediate pecuniary profit, the Seths lent money to Robert Clive at Plassey, and, other repercussions apart, funded their own decline.

(Bharat Karnad is the author most recently of Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet). The author’s views do not reflect Open’s)

Posted in Afghanistan, arms exports, Asian geopolitics, Australia, China, China military, Culture, Defence Industry, disarmament, domestic politics, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian Politics, Japan, Maldives, Military Acquisitions, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian assistance, SAARC, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Tibet, United States, US., Vietnam, Weapons, Western militaries | 45 Comments

Khibiny blinder/silencer

Posted on April 28, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Over the past 50 years, the Indian military services have been armed mostly with Russian weapons and supporting hardware. These Russian systems have proved their utility and ruggedness, which last is not an attribute to be under-estimated. And yet, growingly, sections of the military officer cadre are being seduced by the supposedly superior Western counterpart systems, despite being aware that these are optimized for temperate fighting climates of Europe and northeastern Asia, and do not/cannot fare as well in the tropics where the heat and the dust are, if not disabling factors, can cause severe attrition in performance.

A case in point — special hangars for the French Mirage 2000 and potentially, Rafale, combat aircraft versus the frontline Su-30 MKI judged the finest fighter plane in business braving the Indian sun, sitting on the simmering tarmac without cover of any sort, all the year round, ready to fly off at a moment’s notice. Oh, sure, in the last few years the IAF has erected basic asbestos/corrugated tin-roofed shelters with sides open for the these hardy Sukhois (as at 2 Wing base at Lohegaon, Pune)!

And just what is the edge Western vendors have always claimed for their military equipment and weapons platforms and repeated ad infinitum by their well-wishers and pushers here, in and out of uniform? Their electronics/ avionics/software-driven systems, right? It turns out that is not any more the case. US military circles are still agog with how a Russian Su-24 tactical strike aircraft flew over an Aegis missile destroyer and in its first pass over the American warship venturing into the Black Sea during the Crimean crisis in April 2014 and before getting in range of its on-board weapons, completely and remotely shut down the radar at the heart of the Aegis system — rendering the intruding ship instantly blind and deaf.

The news of this is just getting out in the western media even as the Russian press had reported this incident at the time. The outcome was a shaken US Navy has not again deployed any vessels in the Black Sea. The attenuating circumstances trotted out are that Cook was in solo and that Aegis works best when there are more Aegis units sharing, triangulating, target info, etc. Except, the more complex the system, the easier it is, according to Russian EW/ECW specialists to knock them out. The means to do so — i.e.,impose a blackout on the USS Cook was the Khibiny electronic counter-measures system on the Su-24 which, after blinding and silencing the Aegis, made 12 attack passes to drive home the point to the crew on board the American missile destroyer about the extremely vulnerable state it had been reduced to, and so easily. So much for US’ avionics/electronics edge.

Khibiny, by the way, will be fitted/retro-fitted on all Russian combat aircraft, starting with the Su-35 plane — the very aircraft the IAF wouldn’t let the Strategic Forces Command buy for its nuclear mission!

I thank a correspondent for alerting me to this incident, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s4sKAMgYsU
and for info on Russian EC/ECW systems refer https://russiandefpolicy.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/how-good-is-russian-electronic-warfare-part-i/

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., West Asia | 22 Comments

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